From the sublime to the ridiculous

Hah, that’s had you fumbling with your bi-focals, but no, there is no printing error. It is £375. The Gregynog Press, which in 1923 started its eventful history with a volume of poems by George Herbert, has now 80 years later published a selection chosen by his kinsman the Earl of Powis, with engravings by Sarah van Nierkerk. This appears on the eve of the UK Fine Press Book Fair in the Oxford Brookes University on 1 November and it would require a battalion of the British Army to prise its purple quarter leather and gold lettering from hands which have never held anything like this before. My hands.

And I have not done, for there is more. Beyond this edition there is another, of 15 copies in dark purple goatskin on dyed calf, with endbands of purple and grey silk. These are £2,000 each, and we are in a world of little locked shops in cathedral cities where the post is registered and few of us go.

There is an irony in all this, for on his deathbed Herbert left instructions to his friend Nicholas Ferrar as to the disposal of these poems, written towards the end of his life and never published. ‘Desire him to read [them], and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any poor dejected soul, let [them] be made public; if not, let him burn [them]…’ I can hear the small, embarrassed chuckle at the beauty of this book. They may not have been like us, these men of the 17th century, one foot in the world, the other God alone knows where, but someone able to write like Herbert could not but have known the value of his work.